Binging with Babish: Fire Flakes from Avatar The Last Airbender

(suspenseful music) - Hey, there's some food. - Finally. (Tapping footsteps) What do you have? - Flaming Fire Flakes, the best in the city. - I'll take you! MMM! (crunchy

flakes

) Ah! Oh, heat, heat! (panting) - Hot, flaming

flakes

of

fire

. What do you know? - Hello, what's up guys? Welcome back to "Binging With Babish" (upbeat music), where this week we'll take a look at the Fire Flakes from "Avatar: The Last Airbender." Here before me are some real life flakes of

fire

, Flaming Hot Cheetos. This, of course, is a very, very funny joke, but as funny as this joke is, if Flaming Hot Cheetos is still your spicy and crunchy snack of choice, oh, you're welcome.

Anyway, this isn't a show about comparing different types of spicy snacks, it's about making our own and my first attempt, mixing Corn Flakes with cayenne pepper produced mixed results. (slapping hands) (coughing) And going against all conventional wisdom, milk offered no improvement, so it looks like we're going to have to start from scratch and for our Fire Flakes base there's a really great recipe on ChefSteps for a sort of fried puffed rice cracker that I think will work really well with some spices added because "Flaming Fire Flakes, spicy." Thus, in a medium saucepan we combine 100 grams of long-grain white rice and 400 grams of water.

While it cooks, we will make a spice blend reminiscent of Chinese five spice. In the mortar of a pestle and mortar place half a small cinnamon stick, half a small star anise pod, about a teaspoon of fennel seeds and a generous shake, Oh! Not that kind of shake. A generous shake of spicy, tingly and strangely numbing Szechuan peppercorns. I want the flavor and feel to predominate, so I'll add about two tablespoons. Then, by virtue of my mortar and pestle, I'm going to mix these spices by hand with a mortar and pestle until I get a finely ground powder, which, as you can see, is quite exhausting.

You can do this, Andy, you got it. You may not have made the football team, but you can get out, screw it, I'm going to get the blender. So instead of using a high-powered blender, we'll grind our spices to a fine powder, then pass them through a fine mesh strainer to capture any large chunks of horn and then the resulting powder will be a little bitter, pungent and strangely spicy, but don't worry, once it gets a little heat treatment it will taste much better, but then to complement its color and spiciness, we'll also add a little cayenne pepper and sweet paprika. about a teaspoon each, shaken small until smooth.

Meanwhile, on the stove our rice has been cooked for about 15 minutes and is completely mashed. So now, using that same high-powered blender, we're going to blend it into a paste with a couple of teaspoons of our seasoning mix, give it a little flavor to make sure it's spicy enough. Don't worry if it tastes a little bad, it will taste much better once we cook it, but before we can cook it we must first dehydrate it. Then, using an offset spatula, we will smooth it until we obtain a sheet one millimeter thick on a Silpat. Obviously you don't have to measure it or anything, just make sure it's very thin.

The thinner your leaf, the sweeter rewards and now get out the biggest dehydrator you have at home, add your spiced mashed rice spread, it sure sounds appetizing right? Close your frankly lovely French doors if you have them, set this guy to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, and let him dehydrate for two hours, during which time your sheets should mostly dehydrate, more toward the edges than the center. So when we remove them we will do two things. First, we are going to take them off the Silpat. They'll probably still be sticky on the bottom, don't worry about that, we'll turn those leaves sticky side up onto the dehydrator racks and break off any parts that are completely dehydrated.

They should be slightly flexible but break when stressed. Everything else that hasn't dried yet goes into the dehydrator for another 30 minutes, after which you should have two sheets of very disturbing looking, skin-like rice crackers, things that we're now going to break down into flakes because, You know, Fire Flakes. You want to divide them into about half the size you would eventually want them to be because they will expand about 50 percent when we fry them. In 350 degree Fahrenheit oil they stay for about five seconds, that's all the time they should take to inflate and float to the surface.

Drain them on paper towels, rinse and repeat and then it's time to discover how surprisingly good they are. Let's hear my unfiltered reaction. Mmm, oh my god. Hey. Oh my god, that's really good. That's really good. Holy (bleep)! I'm not always surprised when the food I'm making turns out well, but my pre-fried taste test hadn't given me high hopes, but here we are with some spicy, tangy, savory, crunchy, oily, delicious little snacks that I think would do well. a little more flavor and of course a generous pinch of kosher salt applied and mixed in while hot.

I don't know why I'm using so many bowls here, at least I can't use more to make this recipe, ah damn! There you have it, Fire Flakes as I always imagined them. They are spicy and tingly and the flake itself has this light, ethereal, bubbly, disappear-in-your-mouth, chew-like crunch, and they are spicy from the cayenne pepper and Szechuan peppercorn, but they are not "scratchy" . your tongue" hot. If you want "Avatar: The Last Airbender" to be precise, just increase the spice content because, you know, "Flaming Fire Flakes, spicy." (upbeat music)